Ashley: A bit of a clown when it comes to football?In an interview for Sky TV, Alan Pardew expresses the depths of Mike Ashley’s confusion about football and erroneously claims the club has no debt.
Normally, I avoid the Daily Mail unless I have fires to light but this particular interview, originally for Sky TV, caught my eye.
In the interview, Pardew says:
“Mike is a strong character who has been a success in his whole business life and is a genius in that world – but when you come to football, the logic doesn’t quite fit.
“He loves football but he sometimes can’t understand how it works and it confuses and upsets him, and when he is upset, he does things that aren’t brilliant for the football club.
“That’s just Mike and he has funded the club, made sure we have no debt – other than to himself – and supported me, but unless we get a billionaire from deepest Russia we are probably not going to be able to compete with the likes of Man United, Man City and Chelsea, which is what our fans want.(more…)
Sports Direct: Only using ‘unused’ advertising space.Inspired by members of the NUFC board saying Sports Direct only takes up unused advertising space at SJP, as well as Newcastle United’s lousy commercial revenue figures, I decided to do a little number crunching and research.
Referring to figures from other clubs using Deloitte’s “Annual Review of Football Finance” and all the other sources I could find, as well as looking at other revenue streams for the club using the club’s last published accounts. I estimate that as per Newcastle United’s last published accounts (for the 2011-12 season), the club is only getting just over half the commercial revenue it should be.
According to my research, if Newcastle United were an average Premier League club with around 27% of the club’s revenue coming from commercial sources such as shirt sales and sponsorship, we should be getting around £25 million per season in total when we are actually only getting only a paltry £13.8 million. Having written that, with the third highest average attendances in the Premier League, some might say that these figures could be skewed somewhat as Newcastle United might be expected to get a higher percentage than normal from matchday revenue. However, they were exactly the same as the average for the whole Premier League, around £21.5 million of £93.3 million, or 23% of total turnover. (more…)
Mike Ashley: Laughing all the way to the bank again.With the news that Mike Ashley’s downmarket sports chain, Sports Direct, is about to be included in the reshuffled FTSE 100 Index of the top 100 UK companies, I took a peek at their latest figures, as I do from time to time.
As has been the norm with Sports Direct for quite some time now, the figures were obscene, with profits rising a whopping 23.2% to £260.1 million.
What caught my eye however was the current Sports Direct share price standing at well over £7 and rising three or four times just as I was reading it over the share ticker. This means that Ashley’s current 64% holding in Sports Direct International is now worth over £2.75 billion, and this is after Ashley cashed in some 4% of his shares for over £100 million back in February.
To put this in perspective in terms of Newcastle United and it’s importance in the scheme of things to Ashley, that is well over 10 times the value of what Ashley has invested in the club, around £262 million. This includes a debt of around £129 million to Ashley, most of which is repayable on demand with the rest secured on future broadcasting revenue. (more…)
Joe Kinnear welcoming new signing Loic Remy to the club.Speaking in another ‘exclusive’ interview with Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct News, Alan Pardew was repeating his protestations that Joe Kinnear was only brought into the club to work on the financial side of transfers like Derek Llambias before him.
Anxious to reassure worried fans that he is still in charge of all football matters (please kill us), and that Kinnear was only brought in to make life easier for himself and Mike, Pardew explained:
“It’s quite simple really, it’s not too different to what we had before with Derek Llambias. Mike and Joe work the finances of the football club. Therefore I have to make sure, with Joe, that we’re approaching players in the right financial bracket for us and that we’re doing the right amount of scouting.
“Joe’s job is to co-ordinate that and put it all together. So he has my input, he has Graham Carr’s views and also Mike’s opinion as well in terms of the finance.
“Basically, he gives me a ballpark figure of the sort of player we can perhaps afford and me and Graham give him the targets we think it works for. Joe then works towards finding a solution and it’s as simple as that.(more…)
Part of Mike Ashley’s £25 million transfer profit.Below are a series of tables showing the profits and losses (mostly profits) made by Mike Ashley in player trading since he assumed control of the club early in the 2007-8 season.
Firstly, they are broken down season by season from 2007-8. However, it should be noted the major transfers into the club in his first season as owner were either done in the days of Freddy Shepherd, or were arranged by Shepherd and completed in the transitional period of Ashley takeover, or the first days under the club’s new Chairman at the time, Chris Mort. Players in these two catagories include signings such as Viduka, Barton, Rozehnal, Smith, Cacapa, Enrique, Faye and Beye.
The following ones then display the season by season figures from the 2008-9 season (Ashley’s first full season as owner), with the first purely Ashley signings such as Fabricio Coloccini, Jonas Gutierrez, Xisco and the rest starting to come in. Of course, these are then followed by successive seasons up to the present day. (more…)
